FOUNDING & CREATIVE BOARD

Heiner Benking's focus is on education, environment, future studies, media, technology and policy studies, systems, model, and sign theory, participation and dialogue.

Heiner is a diagonal or lateral thinker (Quergeist), familiar with many territories. One of his involvements lies in nurturing projects making multicomplex issues more comprehensible, tangible and visible in context and cohesion, and bridging the gap beween theory or abstraction and pragmatics, ethics and capacity building .

His concern about new forms of meetings and gatherings led to the development of the open-forum facilitation "tool-box" where a mix of methods are proposed and implemented to foster open conversations, online and face-to-face, in order to empower and encourage, and so create more meaningful outcomes of meetings. http://open-forum.de

Educated as engineer, "map and model-maker" he worked in state planning, consulting, computer graphics, marketing, environmental research and management. His design of a "Blackbox Nature" and "Cognitive Panorama" made him work with youth, tackling with them questions like orientation and knowledge organisation, the questions of the modern media and communication technologies, and how we cope in times of Cyberculture by jointly building and exploring across scales and cultures in a shared, multiperspective embodied covenant which can be experienced as an extensional model to negotiate positions and perspectives and has space for images, signs, metaphors, maps, and stories (PPT-file). 

He has been a starter, in-betweener and go-getter, long creatively involved in various interdisciplinary work groups, worked for consulting houses, think-tanks, national and international organisations, and focussed in the last years on local and global cultural and societal education and communication projects.

BIOGRAPHY                    Contact: heiner@benking.de

Helmut Burkhardt is Founding President of the Council on Global Issues, an Internet based think tank based in Toronto, and past President of Science for Peace, Canada. 

His current work priorities include:

- General System Science

- Scientific ethics

- Three pillars of sustainability: Ecological integrity (healthy environment), societal integrity (peace), and personal integrity (enlightened individuals healthy in mind and body).

- Global issues

- Global solutions, challenges to education and the media

- Appropriate political structures

Together with Julia Morton-Marr, he is working on "Frameworks for Global Sustainability Education" and holistic curriculum development.

BIOGRAPHY

Farah Lenser is a sociologist and journalist with deep relations to many cultural hemispheres. Besides her outstanding reach of interviews and portraits of extraordinary people, she commits herself to nurturing dialogue and decision-culture. 

Farah has for many years explored different ways of Dialog and Conversations, of organising meetings and gatherings, helping groups come to sharing meanings and concerted action, how we can empower and give voice, co-create and invite change and surprise in any group, or generations and cultures dialogues, or with senior "systems" people.

In her bouquet of methods, Farah particularly recommends the Magic Round Table dialogue exercise: a time-credit moderation method where attention and the invitation to speak is embodied as token, given as a present for encourage- or empowerment.

PERSONAL WEBSITE and impressions of events for "re-inventing democracy" on the Open-Forum website. 

JOY is an exceptional artist, mover and networker for INtegrated ART projects. "Making people think is the hardest challenge of our times" is a reason for his creative urge is to interconnect people from different all walks of life, players from all sectors of society to cooperate in public undertakings with strong benefit for society.

He is Founding President of Positive Nett-Works Association, - an interdisciplinary pool of visionaries creating "participatory public spaces" in cooperation with administration, businesses, youth and organisations from the full spectrum of society.

His list of puzzling projects is growing by the week. The most legendary to date is the Future-Raft Adventure, which started in 1998, culminated in 2002, and is simmering for transportation to other hemispheres. More can be seen at http://pool-net.de.

BIOGRAPHY                    Contact: joy@pool-net.de

Julia Morton Marr has been an innovative educator throughout her life. In her work as Founding President of the International Holistic Tourism Centre - IHTEC, operating from Ontario, Canada, she has been designing holistic curricula for Peace & Global Sustainability Education for more than a decade. She is also Chair for Sustainability Education of the Council on Global Issues.

Her "International School Peace Garden" and related programs supporting Peace & Sustainability Education have reached several hundred thousand school children around the world. Her achievements have been endorsed from various sides, including the UN and UNESCO, various ministers of education, organisations and the Vatican.

Julia works on spreading and introducing holistic curriculum development in elementary and secondary schools, as well as higher education.

In June 2005, her commitment was honoured with a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize: http://www.ihtec.org/index.php?id=222: “Julia Morton-Marr teaches children how to be citizens of the world.  With an understanding that peace, justice, and the environment cannot be taught separately, Julia has developed curricula adopted in 3,500 schools in 34 countries. In 1993, Julia founded the International Holistic Tourism Education Centre and the International School Peace Gardens.  An array of topics – from conflict resolution and cultural understanding, to geography and performing arts – are based on the three pillars of human sustainability, ecological integrity, social peace, and individual rights and responsibilities.”

BIOGRAPHY                    Contact: julia@ihtec.on.ca

Eric cares a lot for nurturing Global Sustainability & Democracy Literacy towards Fair Global Citizenship and reminding and empowering the new generation for Learning for What They Care For! For this purpose, Eric creates 'missing links' between tidal wave knowledge environments and society, especially young people in schools.

He designs instruments that empower young people and citizens to effectively shape our societies and actively co-create our future. His flagship PNYV! (Positive News for Youths with Vision) globally maps and visualises positive actors, good practice projects and tidal wave knowledge, makes them applicable in schools and empowers young people to become culturally creative and join the worldwide movement for creating a global, peaceful, just and sustainable civilisation (full project info).

As a contribution to the Evolution of World Order Conference 2004, he has developed the ISLE concept : Informal Sustainability Learning Environments, facilitating the easy introduction of self-guided sustainability learning in schools (see pnyv!). He is also concerned with new education paradigms for a 21st Century civilisation's citizens - see Literacy Spiral.

Eric is also involved in new dialogue culture with Open-Forum, actively involved in facilitating a new action-oriented Conference Culture, and online distance trainings bringing experts and young people together.

Eric was the designated Berlin Captain of the Future-raft / Swimming Future-classroom project until its dramatic ending. Since, he has re-shifted his focus to developing, visualising and coordinating the World Future School project, an online based Online Learning Environment or Virtual Campus. 

Being an initiate to tribal cultures, he is an advocate of omnicultural dialogue, Eric is involved in realising further projects that combine holistic education, youth leadership, social entrepreneurship, authentic intercultural learning, responsible travelling and inter/national sustainability cooperation between tribal, rural and urban communities.

BIOGRAPHY                    Contact: eric@pnyv.org